New Mac client playtest

As part of the ongoing technical investment in setting EVE up for a thriving third decade, the work of making a native EVE client for macOS continues at full speed.

After much progress following an earlier playtest, your insight and feedback is needed to make sure Mac users get the best EVE experience possible. With that in mind, a new public playtest of the native Mac version will run from 11-16 August. The playtest – to which all Mac and Windows pilots are invited – takes place on the Singularity test server and there will also be a special masstest taking place on 12 August. Details on how to join the playtest, the masstest, and how to provide feedback are detailed below.

The Mac version of EVE has been engineered to take advantage of Apple’s powerful graphics processing framework Metal, enabling an authentic New Eden experience on the platform.

This round of playtesting is intended to further refine EVE’s native Mac offering – particularly in the following areas:

• Graphics – A significant number of graphical issues identified in the last playtest have been fixed. However, those contributing to the new playtest are encouraged to report any graphical shortcomings they spot, including assets being rendered incorrectly, black screens, and UI problems.
• Crashes – In the previous playtest the focus to crashes was exclusively on Intel x64-based systems. Due to now having a native Apple Silicon client, the new playtest will include complete coverage of crash reporting on macOS.
• Performance – Several improvements to performance have been made following the last playtest. This time the dev team are keen to hear of any situations where performance is noticeably poor compared to running the game through the Wine client.
• Audio – Playtesting pilots are encouraged to report any missing sounds, music, or garbled audio they come across.
• Input – To optimize EVE for Macs, there has been a careful rewrite of how the game handles mouse and trackpad input. The dev team is now trying to trace a rare issue with ‘stuck keys’ in the client. Please report this issue if you find it.
• Launcher - A seamless launcher experience is vital in growing the EVE community by offering a Mac version. As such, playtesting pilots are encouraged to report any launcher issues that caused friction or stopped them from playing.